John Muir Writings

Man’s Place in the Universe

by John Muir

The world, we are told, was made
especially for man - a presumption not
supported by all the facts. A numerous class
of men are painfully astonished whenever they
find anything, living or dead, in all God’s
universe, which they cannot eat or render in
some way what they call useful to
themselves. They have precise dogmatic
insight into the intentions of the Creator, and
it is hardly possible to be guilty of irreverence
in speaking of their God any more than of
heathen idols. He is regarded as a civilized,
law-abiding gentlemen in favor either of a
republican form of government or of a limited
monarchy; believes in the literature and
language of England; is a warm supporter of
the English constitution and Sunday schools
and missionary societies; and is as purely a
manufactured article as any puppet at a half-
penny theater.

With such views of the Creator it is, of
course, not surprising that erroneous views
should be entertained of the creation. To such
properly trimmed people, the sheep, for
example, is an easy problem - food and
clothing “for us,” eating grass and daisies
white by divine appointment for this
predestined purpose, on perceiving the demand
for wool that would be occasioned by the
eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden.

In the same pleasant plan, whales are
storehouses of oil for us, to help out the stars
in lighting our dark ways until the discovery
of the Pennsylvania oil wells. Among
plants, hemp, to say nothing of the cereals, is
a case of evident destination for ships’ rigging,
wrapping packages, and hanging the wicked.
Cotton is another plain case of clothing. Iron
was made for hammers and ploughs, and lead
for bullets; all intended for us. And so of other
small handfuls of insignificant things.

But if we should ask these profound
expositors of God’s intentions, How about
those man-eating animals - lions, tigers,
alligators - which smack their lips over raw
man? Or about those myriads of noxious
insects that destroy labor and drink his blood?
Doubtless man was intended for food and drink
for all these? Oh no! Not at all! These are
unresolvable difficulties connected with
Eden’s apple and the Devil. Why does water
drown its lord? Why do so many minerals
poison him? Why are so many plants and
fishes deadly enemies? Why is the lord of
creation subjected to the same laws of life as
his subjects? Oh, all these things are satanic,
or in some way connected with the first garden.

Now, it never seems to occur to these far-
seeing teachers that Nature’s object in
making animals and plants might possibly be
first of all the happiness of each one of
them, not the creation of all for the happiness
of one. Why should man value himself as more
than a small part of the one great unit of
creation? And what creature of all that the
Lord has taken the pains to make is not
essential to the completeness of that unit -
the cosmos? The universe would be
incomplete without man; but it would also be
incomplete without the smallest
transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond
our conceitful eyes and knowledge.

From the dust of the earth, from the
common elementary fund, the Creator has
made Homo sapiens. From the same material
he has made every other creature, however
noxious and insignificant to us. They are
earth-born companions and our fellow
mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of
this laborious patch-work of modern
civilization cry “Heresy” on every one whose
sympathies reach a single hair’s breadth
beyond the boundary epidermis of our own
species. Not content with taking all of earth,
they also claim the celestial country as the
only ones who possess the kind of souls for
which that imponderable empire was planned.

This star, our own good earth, made many
a successful journey around the heavens ere
man was made, and whole kingdoms of
creatures enjoyed existence and returned to
dust ere man appeared to claim them. After
human beings have also played their part in
Creation’s plan, they too may disappear
without any general burning or extraordinary
commotion whatever.

Plants are credited with but dim and
uncertain sensation, and minerals with
positively none at all. But why may not even a
mineral arrangement of matter be endowed
with sensation of a kind that we in our blind
exclusive perfection can have no manner of
communication with?

But I have wandered from my subject. I
stated a page or two back that man claimed
the earth was made for him and I was going
to say that venomous beasts, thorny plants,
and deadly diseases of certain parts of the
earth prove that the whole world was not
made for him. When an animal from a tropical
climate is taken to high latitudes, it may
perish of cold, and we say that such an animal
was never intended for so severe a climate.
But when man betakes himself to sickly parts
of the tropics and perishes, he cannot see
that he was never intended for such deadly
climates. No, he will rather accuse the first
mother of the cause of the difficulty, though
she may never have seen a fever district; or
will consider it a providential chastisement
for some self-invented form of sin.

Furthermore, all uneatable and uncivilized
animals, and all plants which carry prickles,
are deplorable evils which, according to
closes researches of clergy, require the
cleansing chemistry of universal planetary
combustion. But more than aught else mankind
requires burning, as being in great part
wicked, and if that transmundane furnace can
be so applied and regulated as to smelt and
purify us into conformity with the rest of the
terrestrial creation, then the tophetization of
the erratic genius Homo were a
consummation devoutly to be prayed for. But,
glad to leave these ecclesiastical fires and
blunders, I joyfully return to the immortal
truth and immortal beauty of Nature.